Department of Energy BRAGGED About Superdome Lighting Before Blackout

As the Second Half of yesterday’s Super Bowl game was into its second series of downs half the stadium mysteriously lost power and the game had to be delayed almost 40 minutes. Some people blame the electrifying half-time performance by Beyonce, many of the more liberal persuasion (jokingly) blamed Bush.

The play-by-play team was on the blacked out part of the stadium so CBS had to cut to commercial moments of the blackout before returning to a stadium in
minor chaos. Players on both sides killed time by stretching and passing
the ball while commentators talked their way through an outage.

In the end it was some sort of surge which blew a circuit breaker, but the complicated lighting system of the Superdome takes a long time to “reboot.” One interesting part of the story is that on Super Bowl Sunday the Department of Energy posted a story bragging about the energy-saving lighting system used by the New Orleans stadium.

While the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers compete to hoist the Vince Lombardi trophy this weekend, eco-friendly fans and city leaders in New Orleans are competing to maximize sustainability practices to the fullest.

To make this the greenest Super Bowl, the New Orleans Host Committee has partnered with fans and the community to offset energy use across the major Super Bowl venues. The exterior of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome features more than 26,000 LED lights on 96 full-color graphic display panels, designed to wash the building in a spectrum of animated colors, patterns and images. The system draws only 10 kilowatts of electricity — equivalent to the amount of energy used by a small home — and the lights are expected to last for many years before needing replacement.

If this President’s Dept. of Energy gets its way, we will all be using “sustainable” energy systems–just like the City of New Orleans. That way we can add blackouts to the government enforced toilets that don’t flush well and light bulbs that take a half an hour to warm up and even then they don’t throw off enough light, on to our new green life-styles. Not quite as good as the products we used to have–but selected by our government because they believe they know better than us.